A New Year (An open letter to my readers)

Dear Readers,

When I launched jonpenfold.com in early March of 2014, I never imagined it would become such a huge cultural sensation in such a small amount of time. With over 10 million hits a day, translated into 37 different languages, and a major motion picture currently in pre-production, my weekly blog has surpassed all of my expectations. In November, when Facebook offered to buy me out for 60 million dollars, I told Zuckerberg to go screw himself—“I’m not for sale!” After all, he never replied to my letter last May (See: An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg, 5/6/14). “I know you read it, you son-of-a-bitch! I know you read everything I write! I know that you are secretly my biggest fan!” (Note to Zuckerberg: contrary to what I just wrote, I am indeed for sale. Seriously, just call me and we can discuss it. You have my number. You have everybody’s number. You know everything about us.)

Here at jonpenfold.com, 2014 was one hell of a year. Over the course of the last twelve months, we saw ourselves floating in isolation tanks (See: And We’ll All Float on OK, 3/25/14) and drinking whiskey (See: Drinking Whiskey with Lewis and Clark, 3/31/14), but not at the same time. We found ourselves snowboarding down an active volcano (See: From Hood to St. Helens, 5/20/14) and drinking beer (See: A White American Male on India Pale Ale, 8/12/14), but not at the same time. And we saw ourselves running a half marathon and eating lots of donuts, both at the same time (See: A Baker’s Dozen, 5/27/14). We also gambled on horses, went for hikes, dumped ice on our heads, tried to watch soccer, got healthy, got unhealthy, ate out of the garbage, visited strip clubs, and rode bicycles, lots of bicycles, sometimes naked (See: jonpenfold.com).

But now it’s 2015—time for change. Starting next week, jonpenfold.com will have a new format. Instead of “Finding Adventure in Everyday Life,” we will be telling stories—all sorts of stories. True Stories. Made-up stories. Stupid stories. Funny Stories. Scary stories. Serious stories. Controversial stories. Stories that will make you laugh. Stories that will make you scream. Stories that will make you cry. (Ok, maybe not the last one). It will be a bit different than what we were doing in the past year, but I believe it will be for the better. If you like what you read, please share it with your friends. And, if you don’t like what you read, just don’t read it. Because, in the end, just as Ricky Nelson sang, “Ya can’t please everyone, so ya got to please yourself.”

Happy New Year and thanks for reading,

Jon Penfold

jonpenfold.com

My Short X-mas Story

            It was my sixteenth Christmas on Earth and I was old enough to understand that Santa wasn’t real, Jesus wasn’t the actually the Son of God, and my parents weren’t wealthy enough to be wasting their hard-earned money on stupid gifts that their children wouldn’t really appreciate. I unwrapped my presents and received exactly what I expected, exactly what I really needed: underwear, socks, and a membership to AAA. Once all of us kids were done opening all of our gifts from our parents, it was time for us to exchange the ones we got for each other. I can’t recall what my older brother got me, but I’ll never forget the present from my sister, or the one I gave to her. We were both in high school, at that age where practical jokes were much more priceless than anything you could purchase at a store. From my sister, I unwrapped an absolutely useless poster-sized collage, filled with photographs of LeAnn Rimes and Hanson, the band behind the megahit “Mmmmbop.” (At the time, I couldn’t stand Rimes, but to this day, I still don’t understand the pictures of Hanson, for I was, am, and always will be a fan of the blond-haired brothers and their upbeat, feel-good music.) From my parents, my sister had already received what she had been asking for all year—a CD player—so, I thought it would be funny to give her an empty CD case with a fake cover that said, “Haha, I bet you thought this was a CD!” It was hilarious.

My last gift of the day was from my little brother, who was only eleven years old at the time. Not expecting much from my youngest sibling, I was surprised to open a card filled with a half-dozen scratch-off lotto tickets. While my siblings played with their gifts and my parents cleaned up wrapping paper, I scratched off the tickets one by one. Loser. Loser. Loser. Holy shit! Sweet baby Jesus! Santa Clause is real! “I just won ten thousand mother-fucking dollars!

“Hey, watch your language young man!”

But I wasn’t fooling around. I had just won. And I won big!!! What would I buy? A new car? Probably not. A used car? Maybe. Every Beatles album ever produced? Most definitely. “I’m rich. I’m rich. I’m rich!!!!!!!!!”

            “It’s fake.”

            What?

            My little brother breaks out laughing. “It’s fake,” he says. “It’s a fake lotto ticket. I bought it at Spencer’s Gifts.”

            That year, my entire family had a good laugh at my expense, and because of it, it was a Christmas that I’ll never forget. Sometimes the best Christmas memories have nothing to do with spending money, sometimes they have to do with losing it. And Jeremy, by the way, I’m still going to get back at you someday, when you very least suspect it…

The Twelve Films of Christmas

I don't like Christmas! There, I said it. The only thing I hate more than receiving presents is shopping for them. Ugly holiday sweaters are precisely what they claim to be. There's a reason why people don't drink eggnog year round. And don't even get me started on the "true" meaning of Christmas. But before you write me off as a total Scrooge, I'll be the first to admit that Darlene Love's rendition of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" is one of the greatest songs ever recorded, and that there are about a dozen great films that revolve around--or take place during--the holiday season. So, without further ado, here is the jonpenfold.com list of the twelve greatest Christmas movies of all time:

#12) Scrooged

I know, I know, we're all sick of "A Christmas Carol," 

no matter how differently it's being told, 

but this one has Bill Murray as Scrooge, and who could ever grow sick of Bill Murray?

#11) Bad Santa

What could possibly be better than Bill Murray as Scrooge? 

Billy Bob Thorton as a Bad Santa, that's what!

#10) Elf

Will Ferrell as an Elf? What more needs to be said? 

A few more bad career choices and I have a feeling that we'll be seeing an Elf 2...

#9) A Christmas Story

Take away the leg lamp, the frozen tongue, and the soapy mouth, and what's left is a story of a bullied adolescent who wants nothing more than a gun for Christmas. 

Wait, what the hell is this movie about again?

#8) The last 45 minutes of It's a Wonderful Life

Skip all that boring shit about George Bailey's life and jump ahead to the final act, 

where it clearly explains that if you commit suicide, you get to return to an

alternate reality where everyone in town gives you their money. 

Wait, what the hell is this movie about again?

#7) Ernest Saves Christmas

You're probably wondering how this found it's way on the list. Well, once you realize that it was intended to be watched under the influence of hallucinatory drugs, everything will suddenly become perfectly clear.

#6) Batman Returns

Maybe not the best Batman movie ever made, 

but it's the only one that takes place during Christmas.

#5) Rocky IV

Maybe not the best Rocky movie ever made, 

but it's the only one that takes place during Christmas.

#4) National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

Who would have thought that the Griswold's greatest vacation would be the one 

where they didn't really go on vacation at all?

#3) Lethal Weapon

Now that we know what we do about Mel Gibson and his beliefs concerning Christianity,

 it allows us to look at this movie in a completely different way.

#2) Gremlins

A simple lesson for everyone: if your Christmas present comes with instructions, for the sake of your family and neighbors, please just follow them!

#1) Die Hard

As you watch this incredible motion picture, pretend that the character of John McClane is actually a young John McCain. You'll definitely regret voting for Obama back in 2008.

Dumpster Diving: A Detective’s Inquiry into Found Food

             On average, I get sick about twice a year: once in the spring as the seasons are changing, and once again in the fall, when the Grammy nominees are announced. So last week, as God-awful songs such as “Fancy,” and “All about that Bass,” we’re nominated for Record of the Year, I came down with a mild cold. Now, my problem with getting sick isn’t the illness itself—there tend to be treatments for most things these days—but rather my personal obsession with trying to figure out how I got sick in the first place. For some reason, my mind can’t simply accept that I “caught” a cold. I need to know its point of origin. I suddenly become some sort of lousy medical detective, like Dr. Gregory House from the Fox TV show House, but with absolutely no professional training. Regardless of my lack of medicinal knowledge, I always try to figure out the cause of my illness. Was it that pizza I ate on Tuesday evening? Perhaps the “chef” didn’t wash their hands. Or maybe I got it from one of those elderly folks that I deal with at my day job? But I apply hand sanitizer about a hundred times a day, so that seems unlikely. Maybe it was from…

            “Maybe it was from that cookie you ate,” my girlfriend, Katelin, chimes in.

            “What cookie?”

            “You know exactly what cookie I’m talking about. The one you found in the envelope.”

            Oh, that cookie. A good detective must not leave any stone unturned, so let us go back a few days and look at a conversation I had with Katelin concerning this said cookie:

December, 2014, a Tuesday Evening, around 10 p.m.

            “You did what?”

            “I ate a cookie that I found at work.”

            “What do you mean you ‘found’ it?”

            “It was in a drawer.”

            “It was just lying in a drawer?”

            “It was inside an envelope.”

            “What kind of envelope?”

            “A normal white envelope, the kind you use for mailing letters.”

            “So, let me get this straight: you found a cookie, in an envelope, in a drawer, and you decided to eat it. What if somebody poisoned it?”

            “That’s why I only ate one of the cookies, even though there were two in the envelope. Plus, what kind of sick person would poison cookies and then just leave them for someone to find?”

            “What kind of sick person would eat random cookies that they found in an envelope!?”

            Katelin brought up a valid point, and it got me thinking: perhaps it was this “found food” that made me sick. But to be sure, I needed more evidence. I couldn’t examine the cookie since I had already eaten it, but I could look back into my archives and see if there were any other times that I had eaten “found food” and then examine the consequences of those actions. I suddenly became some sort of historical detective, like Lilly Rush on that CBS show, Cold Case. Let’s travel back to the last time I ingested some “found food”:

            February, 2012, a Sunday, late night, actually, early Monday morning, 1 a.m.

Myself and four other twenty-something year old men had just finished a long night of drinking beers and riding children’s bicycles down very steep hills at incredible speeds. As one could expect, those said activities resulted in an unparalleled hunger taking over the depths of our exhausted bodies. We rolled up to a local pizza shop carrying the combined appetite of a wolf pack in winter, but the doors had just been locked for the night. Too late, but wait, one of the trustafarians I was with knew someone who worked there. “At the end of the night,” he said, “they always throw the leftover pizza out. It’s still good and all; we just have to get it out of the garbage.”

So, like a horde of urban raccoons, we rummaged through the trash and left with about ten pounds of cold pizza. Since I had cash in my pocket, the intelligent thing would have been to simply head to another eating establishment and purchase some fresh food, but I was caught up in a classic case of group-think and having one of those “When in Rome” moments. (After all, this did happen in Portland, Oregon, where young people go to retire, and we all know that retired folks eat out of the garbage on a regular basis.) So, I ate the pizza. And it was good. One slice in particular was more impressive than the others—some sort of Mexican pizza covered in nacho cheese. (When I returned to the same pizza shop a few weeks later, during business hours, I was quite shocked to find out that they didn’t offer a pizza with nacho cheese sauce). Anyway, to make a short story shorter, I became extremely ill following the garbage pizza incident, developing one of the worst colds I’ve ever had in my life.

            So, there we have it, case closed, fine detective work leads to another mystery solved: eating “found food” can cause illness. Who would have thought? Luckily, as I preformed a search and seizure on the medicine cabinet in my bathroom, I discovered an old bottle of cold syrup that was a few years past the expiration date…

Next Time on Penfold, Pointless Detective: Does medicine really expire?

Our Most Important Right

            The Chinese banned puns last week. Apparently, General Tso was finally fed up with people thinking he was a coward. Or something like that—I don’t really know much about China or its culture. Authorities have yet to announce what the punishment will be for disobeying the order (Get it? “Pun”-ishment), which clearly states: “Radio and television authorities at all levels must tighten up their regulations and crack down on the irregular and inaccurate use of the Chinese language, especially the misuse of idioms.”

            I know what you’re thinking: Who cares what the government of some country on the other side of the world is doing to its citizens? Here in the good old U.S. of A., we’re concerned with more important topics, like gun-control, not pun-control. (See what I did there?) After all, we have freedom of speech—The First Amendment says that we can say whatever we Goddamn please! Well, that might be changing.

            The United States Supreme Court is currently listening to arguments concerning free speech and the Internet. The case revolves around a man named Anthony Elonis, who was sentenced to four years in prison for posting explicit rap lyrics on his Facebook account. In his lyrics, he threatened to murder his wife and shoot up an elementary school. Elonis claimed to be venting through an artistic outlet, much like the rapper Eminem. The court said he was guilty of transmitting interstate threats “to injure the person of another.”

            While the national media blinds us with reports about Ferguson, Missouri, this much more important issue is being lost in the teargas. The Supreme Court’s decision concerning this “freedom of speech” issue has the capability of drastically changing the way we interpret the First Amendment, and consequently, the way we perceive America as a country, and as an idea.

            If the Court decides that Elonis is in fact guilty of transmitting interstate threats, then social media as we know it will be forever changed. Sure, there is no place for violence in a civilized society (except for in football, hockey, MMA, boxing, playground fights, television, war…) but Elonis did not commit a single act of violence. Remember the old saying: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” People say stupid shit all the time—especially on social media—but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to act upon their words.

            And what’s going to happen if the court decides against Elonis, against free expression? Who will get to decide who’s a legitimate threat, and who’s just some dumb-ass who had a bit too much to drink before signing on to Facebook? For example, what happens if I say: It sure would be nice if someone cut off Tom Brady’s left leg just below the knee? (That sonofabitch would probably still throw for 3,000 yards.) Or, the world sure would be a better place if Kim Kardashian wasn’t in it. Could those statements be taken as threats? I bet Kanye West would think so.

            As a writer, I have a much larger stake in this issue than most people, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t concern every American, regardless if you use social media or not. Altering our First Amendment could cause a very large ripple effect. If the Court starts interpreting the words we use, then what’s next? Do you want to live in an America that has free speech, or an America that’s free of speech? We can’t allow a crooked government to rob us blind. Do you really want to be left without our most important right? Oh shit! I just got banned from the Chinese Internet.